Actually one interesting bit from the article is that in their tests, javascript in most browsers is now so fast that it is rarely significant in comparison to rendering performance. Chrome is fast at javascript yes, but I hadn't realised that its super-performance was because it also leaves all the other browsers' rendering engine's in its dust. I don't know what Google feeds its developers on the Chrome project, but it's working.;)
I'm not so quick to forget why I dropped IE in the first place. To get away from ActiveX and general apathetic browser security. Where's that represented in benchmark?
Well, that's more specifically why you dropped IE 5.5 and IE6. By the time you get to IE8, these aren't really issues and Firefox has traded its early security-consciousness for usability. And it looks from those charts that IE9 runs pretty fast. That lines up with my own experiences of the beta. Though it's worth keeping in mind that the IE9 is a beta so it's not 100% fair to draw conclusions until it goes to release.
The most interesting things in the article aren't in TFS, though. One is that javascript processing is now apparently so fast that it's dwarfed by the time it actually takes the browser to render an updated page. Another is that in order to get the results from Firefox that they did, they actually had to drop a number of anomalous results where it ran vastly more slowly for unknown reasons. I'm not surprised as Firefox has been getting fatter and fatter ever since 3. The third is that Chrome blows everything else out of the water. They used an old version of Opera which is a shame as I have the newer one and my anecdotal impression is that it's snappier than the previous one so it would have been worth using the latest Opera. But still, Chrome apparently renders far faster than both IE9 and FF. I'd love to know why. Is it just that it's a new project designed from scratch without the cruft that other browsers come with? Does it lack support for significant functionality? Has there been a lot of low-level optimization?
I think in a years time, the real battle is going to be between IE and Chrome. Even today I mainly only use FF for web-development due there being some excellent development add-ons for it that IE can't compete with. Opera is a nice general browser and my default, but its cookie management is shit. Much of FF's funding comes from Google, who I presume would want to push Chrome and who I guess fund Firefox as a means of keeping Microsoft from re-establishing browser-dominance. But that may not be sufficient reason to really push it to be the best it can be, just to keep it "good enough".
I don't wish to be disrespectful to the FF developers. I know how complicated a code-base that size is and they're to be commended on producing a browser that serves well. But it's become a big, unwieldy beast in comparison to the leanness of Chrome and the new IE.
The TV Series: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, expands on what you see as flaws in the time travel plotting. It's quite interesting when two people who know each other from the future have both come back and meet and although initially everything is fine, they realise at some point that each is not who they think the other is - they remember some important events differently, revealing that the one that came back first did change the future and the one that came back second is from that altered future, but the first is not. Neither understands quite how this happened, but it's a fascinating variation on the usual time travel you get in sci fi. It raises the terrifying spectre of people being marooned in timelines that they no longer belong to, the future which produced them collapsed by themselves, like burning down your home.
It seems unfair to project a pre-set notion of how time-travel will work on a film that explicitly rejects a definite answer on the question. Sarah's "No Fate But What You Make" statement and the implication of the movie, is that it is unknown how time travel works in the larger scheme of things. Condemn a movie for being internally inconsistent certainly, but the Terminator movies acknowledge the inconsistency and make a point of it.
Only in the USA. In the UK, Doctor Who is about as mainstream and popular as it gets. Come over here - you'll be happy. Also, you get to watch "Doctor Who at The Proms" at the Royal Albert Hall.:D
Unfortunately your post is not in agreement with copyright rulings that have already said that sweat-of-the-brow labor and the amount of capital investment is not a factor in determining if something is copyrightable.
This isn't sarcasm or Internet snippiness - could you explain how that contravenes what I wrote? I'm not quite sure I get your point / meaning. It might just be a long day on my part.;)
I hope you get a nice +6 Informative for that post. The article you linked to is far more useful than the one in TFS. I particularly liked this bit:
All content from the Media Hub is offered as downloads over Wi-Fi. There will be no online streaming through the Samsung Media Hub.
You will be able to share rented or purchased Media Hub content between five Samsung devices under one account. At launch, Samsung Media Hub will work on select Samsung smartphones and the Galaxy Tab. There are future plans to make Media Hub available on Samsung PCs as well.
Samsung would not comment on whether Media Hub would be coming to its Internet-connect HDTVs.
Though the article also mentions the 1080P capability. Am I being daft or is 1080P pointless on a 1024x600 pixel screen? Or does it mean you can hook it up to a HD television set / monitor and play 1080P content that way?
Interesting, but you've taken what I said completely out of context and used it in a different argument. GP was implying that someone baking a cake using the same recipe that another cook did, was akin to someone pirating a song, which is a terrible analogy. The equivalent (do people really need analogies to understand piracy?) to someone baking their cake according to someone else's recipe is someone renting a recording studio, providing artists, mixing expertise et al. to re-record Lady GaGa's album.
Whether someone has a right to perform someone else's songs is a different discussion to the effects of downloading or distributing copies of a performance across the Internet.
In the old days when you still could walk down to the local record shop wherever you were
Surely you mean that you could walk up hill to the local record shop, both ways.;)
Seriously, I find it a lot easier to find samples of what I want to listen to online than I do to bother going to the local shop. Is this seriously your justification for piracy? Yes, there are some tracks where they have a long lead in and a preview at the beginning isn't much use. But the site that I use (7digital.com) is pretty good about catching these things and often the preview I listen to will start at an appropriate place in the song.
You ask "how many stores will let you choose the sample rate". Well, I know that Magnatune.com does and I used to buy quite a bit from them until they moved to a subscription model. But all the online download stores that I buy from sell in 320kbps which is high. If you're ears don't find 320kbps adequate then you still have the option of buying a CD if you want. If your justification for piracy is that you have to wait a day or two (assuming you don't buy at a store) for something, then your grandparents would probably like to have a long chat with you about perspective. Seriously - "I had to wait two days for something" is not an acceptable rationale for freeloading.
TBH though, because of the app-store lock-in, Apple ought to be able to virtually give-away iPads and still make lots of money, so I can see this battle going on for a good while yet.
Yeah, the specs are interesting, but we need the price to judge whether we might want one or not. That said, I quoted the part of your post I did because buried in the article is a more interesting little nugget: Samsung are throwing in an iTunes competitor through which you can buy and watch TV shows, movies, etc. Now taking on iTunes is a lot more interesting to some of us than taking on the iPad. If the sodding thing has a decent catalogue, decent quality and will let you buffer the movie unlike that bloody LoveFilm site, then it might have got my interest.
Speak of strawmen. I don't think that was the point of GP at all.
GP talks about what products we'd see if there were no copyright. How is the impact of abolishing copyright on funding development of products not relevant?
By the way, if that was true, who would go to gigs, if you already have the song on a CD?
These are different products. A gig is not a CD and a CD is not a gig. But an MP3 legitimately purchased is identical to an MP3 illegitimately downloaded (usually). You can't compare two very different things as an example of how people illegally obtaining one doesn't stop them legitimately obtaining the other. That's a nonsense.
Action: Pirate downloads illegitimate copy instead of buying copy.
Effect: Reduced income for legitimate creator of content.
Relevance to aforementioned effect that piracy was done by copying, not taking of a physical object: None.
In which case there's a strong possibility you don't live in the USA. In Europe, pretty much any DVD player you buy will be region free because people know enough to make it a selling point. In the "what rest of the world" USA, it's very common to find them region-locked.
There is a belief among content creators, which may or may not be true, that you require the backing of a respected, powerful media company in order to succeed.
I think the requirement to have a decent-sized company to market your novel / song / whatever was killed off by two things. The first blow was the Internet. The second blow was social networking. Together these have rendered the need for big content promoters an anachronism. Distribution costs are trivial thanks to the Internet and social networking does wonders for replacing traditional advertising. With so many channels of communication (websites) compared to how few their used to be (radio stations and TV slots), costs for self-promotion have also plummeted.
Of course there is still a very useful role for such companies. They can still do wonders for promoting you work. Not every author, performer or band wants to spend ages promoting themselves and few will do as good a job of it as a professional. And then there are the non-promotional aspects to these companies. Not every guitarist knows the complexities of recording an album. And there's no author born that doesn't need a decent editor.
People haven't quite caught on to how the Internet and Social Networking has opened up new markets. But there's still a great use for agents, record labels and all their ilk. The biggest problem for the adoption of a more personal business relationship between the producer and the customer is piracy. I know people who produce small-press role-playing games and they could produce a lot more if more people bought their products instead of freeloading.
That and the legitimisation of the shark infested waters that are the advertising and promotion industry.
Heh. Well I'll grant you that there some unethical advertising and astroturfing going on.:D But I don't think it's reached the point where I can't click on a thirty second preview of a song at an MP3 store and get an idea or whether I want to spend £0.79 on it, or see a trailer for a Spielberg movie and think: "that's going to be a shmaltzy insulin-coma inducing sugar-fest.";)
No, you have it backwards. It's the media producers who live off other people.
Yep. Just the other day, a "media producer" came to my home and ate all my food. Sarcastic? Yes, a little. But providing me with something that I want in exchange for an agreed price is not "living off me". If someone publishes a book or releases a movie and says they're selling it for X amount of money, that's my choice. Are they offering me something I think is worth X money, yes or no. If yes, I buy it. If no, I don't. If that's living off other people, then so is pretty much any job, and many much more so than the "media producer".
Is it not they, who expect to profit forever, without bound, from a limited amount of work? They, who don't want to accept the market as it exists, and want to impose their own rules on the general population, so that they can live off them without effort?
Wow. That's some dramatic prose in defense of taking for free what others who paid to produce. It's pirates "who don't want to accept the market as it exists" as they are the ones bypassing the market and setting their own conditions on others without that party's agreement. A "market" is agreed exchange. If author Jane offers her work for amount X, that imposes nothing on you. You are free to negotiate or walk away, and that is the market. If some freeloader says to Jane: you have no ability to negotiate with me - I'm taking this and there's nothing you can do about it, then that meets your flowery language of "imposing their own rules" does it not? That meets your definition of "living off them without effort" does it not?
We owe them nothing.
Someone produces a book, movie, song, game that you enjoy and you say you "owe them nothing".
to encourage these lazy persons to produce our music
The "lazy persons produce our music", eh? You see no contradiction in that sentence? You condemn as lazy people who write novels, record albums, film movies, develop games. You have no conception of how much work or expense any of these things involve, clearly. If it's so trivial, and you're so not lazy, why don't you make your own novels, albums, movies and games? Surely not because that would require effort / money / expertise.
but they have abused our trust and taken it to the extreme.
How, in precise words, has someone abused your trust? Because I've always been under the impression that movies / novels / music / games, were being sold to me. I was never "trusting" that these things were all being thrust into my hands for free only to suddenly find that my trust was broken because someone asked for money as I left the shop or clicked the "Confirm Order" button.
They deserve no pity. The problem is not solved by forcing the population to spend all their extra money on copies of bits
Yes. They are demons, irrevocably damned. We must not pity people who spend their time or money on producing things.
The problem is not solved by forcing the population to spend all their extra money on copies of bits.
Disingenuous in the extreme. When was the last time anyone forced you to spend your money on a movie or TV show or a novel or whatever? Really - when were you forced to spend this money?
It is solved by introducing sane copyright law, that brings balance back into the game.
After the illogical, unsupported and self-contradicting post you just made, you have as much right to talk about "sane" as King Herod does to talk about "child care"
The argument of that comic is that you should steal things because of DRM. Precisely what media are you finding today that DRM prevents your fair use of? You realise that the argument in that comic is no argument for pirating anything that is available without effective DRM?
It's almost taken as a given that the world would have less creativity without copyright but I do wonder.
I think that's a strawman. I don't think anyone is arguing that there would be less creativity, or else you've really picked the wrong word for what you mean. Ideas flow. What copyright does is enable people (whether the producer(s) directly or an organisation such as a company) to invest effort in bringing that creativity to its limits. Your recipe analogy is a very bad one. It's instructions for how to do something. (And no, that's not the same as software). Writing a novel takes a long time and is a lot of work. Producing a movie, even a cheap one, takes much more money than most individuals have to spare. Leaving aside why should anyone put all that effort or money in to bring a concept to fruition, you can't even solve the how if people aren't willing to commit to paying for viewing / listening to / reading the final work.
Of course no someone is going to complain that composing and cooking a good meal can't be compared to composing and playing a good piece of music because..... well just because!
No, we'll point out that it's a naff comparison. The analogue to someone pirating music is not that person saying: "hey, I like Lady GaGa's new song. Let's also rent a studio, arrange the musicians, record it and mix it". And you must know this.
What if the movie, the song or the game were so awfully bad that the pirate wasn't even able (or willing) to consume the material? Why should he buy it?
Music: There are any number of sites where you can listen to either the whole track or the first thirty seconds to see if you'll like it or not. Are you seriously suggesting that you need to pirate music to know if you'll like it or not?
Movies: Trailers, reviews, friends. Live a little dangerously - take a chance that you might not 100% enjoy a movie before you rent it or go to see it.
Games: Reviews, demos, friends, reasonable educated guesses.
Seriously, your justification for piracy is that the risk of the very occasional lemon that sneaks through is too much? That this is such an impact on life that taking without paying becomes legitimised?
GP wasn't attempting to hype up piracy. He was attempting to legitimise it with the "everybody does it" argument. Which he is unable to support with statistics, incidentally. The media we enjoy is funded by those of us who pay for it. The freeloaders do nothing but live off other people.
Not anymore, so you can stop worrying. Your right to free entertainment is now saved by the heroic pirates.
Fuck the freeloading pirates. All I want is to be able to stick a Blu-Ray that I've bought into my Linux box and play it properly. Admittedly I've got it working now, but it certainly wasn't easy at the time (I imagine it's a bit simpler now, but still not trivial).
Here's a practical test for you then. Go punch a car windscreen and see how many bones you have left in your hand thereafter. That's something that is entirely glass (if you ignore the heating wires) and it's pretty tough. The GP's point stands: Even if the thing were 1/4", that wouldn't necessarily mean it were fragile.
The last thing I would want would be a device that was as thin as the panel on my phone. Okay, I want my device to be light, but I also want it to have a reasonable chance of surviving being sat on.
How does burning a book violate anyone's human rights?
Comments that get nested as deeply as this thread is doing, it gets hard to track who is arguing for which side. You're mistaken - I'm actually arguing that hindering people from burning the book would impose on their human rights.
So you're arguing they are morally obliged to broadcast a message they fully disagree with and find repugnant?
Same way I'm being morally obliged to defend this church's privilege in broadcasting an event that I disagree with and find stupid. Free Speech for all and it shouldn't be hindered.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually one interesting bit from the article is that in their tests, javascript in most browsers is now so fast that it is rarely significant in comparison to rendering performance. Chrome is fast at javascript yes, but I hadn't realised that its super-performance was because it also leaves all the other browsers' rendering engine's in its dust. I don't know what Google feeds its developers on the Chrome project, but it's working. ;)
I'm not so quick to forget why I dropped IE in the first place. To get away from ActiveX and general apathetic browser security. Where's that represented in benchmark?
Well, that's more specifically why you dropped IE 5.5 and IE6. By the time you get to IE8, these aren't really issues and Firefox has traded its early security-consciousness for usability. And it looks from those charts that IE9 runs pretty fast. That lines up with my own experiences of the beta. Though it's worth keeping in mind that the IE9 is a beta so it's not 100% fair to draw conclusions until it goes to release.
The most interesting things in the article aren't in TFS, though. One is that javascript processing is now apparently so fast that it's dwarfed by the time it actually takes the browser to render an updated page. Another is that in order to get the results from Firefox that they did, they actually had to drop a number of anomalous results where it ran vastly more slowly for unknown reasons. I'm not surprised as Firefox has been getting fatter and fatter ever since 3. The third is that Chrome blows everything else out of the water. They used an old version of Opera which is a shame as I have the newer one and my anecdotal impression is that it's snappier than the previous one so it would have been worth using the latest Opera. But still, Chrome apparently renders far faster than both IE9 and FF. I'd love to know why. Is it just that it's a new project designed from scratch without the cruft that other browsers come with? Does it lack support for significant functionality? Has there been a lot of low-level optimization?
I think in a years time, the real battle is going to be between IE and Chrome. Even today I mainly only use FF for web-development due there being some excellent development add-ons for it that IE can't compete with. Opera is a nice general browser and my default, but its cookie management is shit. Much of FF's funding comes from Google, who I presume would want to push Chrome and who I guess fund Firefox as a means of keeping Microsoft from re-establishing browser-dominance. But that may not be sufficient reason to really push it to be the best it can be, just to keep it "good enough".
I don't wish to be disrespectful to the FF developers. I know how complicated a code-base that size is and they're to be commended on producing a browser that serves well. But it's become a big, unwieldy beast in comparison to the leanness of Chrome and the new IE.
The TV Series: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, expands on what you see as flaws in the time travel plotting. It's quite interesting when two people who know each other from the future have both come back and meet and although initially everything is fine, they realise at some point that each is not who they think the other is - they remember some important events differently, revealing that the one that came back first did change the future and the one that came back second is from that altered future, but the first is not. Neither understands quite how this happened, but it's a fascinating variation on the usual time travel you get in sci fi. It raises the terrifying spectre of people being marooned in timelines that they no longer belong to, the future which produced them collapsed by themselves, like burning down your home.
It seems unfair to project a pre-set notion of how time-travel will work on a film that explicitly rejects a definite answer on the question. Sarah's "No Fate But What You Make" statement and the implication of the movie, is that it is unknown how time travel works in the larger scheme of things. Condemn a movie for being internally inconsistent certainly, but the Terminator movies acknowledge the inconsistency and make a point of it.
Yes, I am a colossal nerd.
Only in the USA. In the UK, Doctor Who is about as mainstream and popular as it gets. Come over here - you'll be happy. Also, you get to watch "Doctor Who at The Proms" at the Royal Albert Hall. :D
Unfortunately your post is not in agreement with copyright rulings that have already said that sweat-of-the-brow labor and the amount of capital investment is not a factor in determining if something is copyrightable.
This isn't sarcasm or Internet snippiness - could you explain how that contravenes what I wrote? I'm not quite sure I get your point / meaning. It might just be a long day on my part. ;)
Though the article also mentions the 1080P capability. Am I being daft or is 1080P pointless on a 1024x600 pixel screen? Or does it mean you can hook it up to a HD television set / monitor and play 1080P content that way?
Interesting, but you've taken what I said completely out of context and used it in a different argument. GP was implying that someone baking a cake using the same recipe that another cook did, was akin to someone pirating a song, which is a terrible analogy. The equivalent (do people really need analogies to understand piracy?) to someone baking their cake according to someone else's recipe is someone renting a recording studio, providing artists, mixing expertise et al. to re-record Lady GaGa's album.
Whether someone has a right to perform someone else's songs is a different discussion to the effects of downloading or distributing copies of a performance across the Internet.
In the old days when you still could walk down to the local record shop wherever you were
Surely you mean that you could walk up hill to the local record shop, both ways. ;)
Seriously, I find it a lot easier to find samples of what I want to listen to online than I do to bother going to the local shop. Is this seriously your justification for piracy? Yes, there are some tracks where they have a long lead in and a preview at the beginning isn't much use. But the site that I use (7digital.com) is pretty good about catching these things and often the preview I listen to will start at an appropriate place in the song.
You ask "how many stores will let you choose the sample rate". Well, I know that Magnatune.com does and I used to buy quite a bit from them until they moved to a subscription model. But all the online download stores that I buy from sell in 320kbps which is high. If you're ears don't find 320kbps adequate then you still have the option of buying a CD if you want. If your justification for piracy is that you have to wait a day or two (assuming you don't buy at a store) for something, then your grandparents would probably like to have a long chat with you about perspective. Seriously - "I had to wait two days for something" is not an acceptable rationale for freeloading.
TBH though, because of the app-store lock-in, Apple ought to be able to virtually give-away iPads and still make lots of money, so I can see this battle going on for a good while yet.
Yeah, the specs are interesting, but we need the price to judge whether we might want one or not. That said, I quoted the part of your post I did because buried in the article is a more interesting little nugget: Samsung are throwing in an iTunes competitor through which you can buy and watch TV shows, movies, etc. Now taking on iTunes is a lot more interesting to some of us than taking on the iPad. If the sodding thing has a decent catalogue, decent quality and will let you buffer the movie unlike that bloody LoveFilm site, then it might have got my interest.
Speak of strawmen. I don't think that was the point of GP at all.
GP talks about what products we'd see if there were no copyright. How is the impact of abolishing copyright on funding development of products not relevant?
By the way, if that was true, who would go to gigs, if you already have the song on a CD?
These are different products. A gig is not a CD and a CD is not a gig. But an MP3 legitimately purchased is identical to an MP3 illegitimately downloaded (usually). You can't compare two very different things as an example of how people illegally obtaining one doesn't stop them legitimately obtaining the other. That's a nonsense.
Pirates don't actually take anything.
Action: Pirate downloads illegitimate copy instead of buying copy.
Effect: Reduced income for legitimate creator of content.
Relevance to aforementioned effect that piracy was done by copying, not taking of a physical object: None.
In which case there's a strong possibility you don't live in the USA. In Europe, pretty much any DVD player you buy will be region free because people know enough to make it a selling point. In the "what rest of the world" USA, it's very common to find them region-locked.
Exactly my point - the argument presented was one against DRM, not one that worked as an argument for piracy.
There is a belief among content creators, which may or may not be true, that you require the backing of a respected, powerful media company in order to succeed.
I think the requirement to have a decent-sized company to market your novel / song / whatever was killed off by two things. The first blow was the Internet. The second blow was social networking. Together these have rendered the need for big content promoters an anachronism. Distribution costs are trivial thanks to the Internet and social networking does wonders for replacing traditional advertising. With so many channels of communication (websites) compared to how few their used to be (radio stations and TV slots), costs for self-promotion have also plummeted.
Of course there is still a very useful role for such companies. They can still do wonders for promoting you work. Not every author, performer or band wants to spend ages promoting themselves and few will do as good a job of it as a professional. And then there are the non-promotional aspects to these companies. Not every guitarist knows the complexities of recording an album. And there's no author born that doesn't need a decent editor.
People haven't quite caught on to how the Internet and Social Networking has opened up new markets. But there's still a great use for agents, record labels and all their ilk. The biggest problem for the adoption of a more personal business relationship between the producer and the customer is piracy. I know people who produce small-press role-playing games and they could produce a lot more if more people bought their products instead of freeloading.
That and the legitimisation of the shark infested waters that are the advertising and promotion industry.
Heh. Well I'll grant you that there some unethical advertising and astroturfing going on. :D But I don't think it's reached the point where I can't click on a thirty second preview of a song at an MP3 store and get an idea or whether I want to spend £0.79 on it, or see a trailer for a Spielberg movie and think: "that's going to be a shmaltzy insulin-coma inducing sugar-fest." ;)
No, you have it backwards. It's the media producers who live off other people.
Yep. Just the other day, a "media producer" came to my home and ate all my food. Sarcastic? Yes, a little. But providing me with something that I want in exchange for an agreed price is not "living off me". If someone publishes a book or releases a movie and says they're selling it for X amount of money, that's my choice. Are they offering me something I think is worth X money, yes or no. If yes, I buy it. If no, I don't. If that's living off other people, then so is pretty much any job, and many much more so than the "media producer".
Is it not they, who expect to profit forever, without bound, from a limited amount of work? They, who don't want to accept the market as it exists, and want to impose their own rules on the general population, so that they can live off them without effort?
Wow. That's some dramatic prose in defense of taking for free what others who paid to produce. It's pirates "who don't want to accept the market as it exists" as they are the ones bypassing the market and setting their own conditions on others without that party's agreement. A "market" is agreed exchange. If author Jane offers her work for amount X, that imposes nothing on you. You are free to negotiate or walk away, and that is the market. If some freeloader says to Jane: you have no ability to negotiate with me - I'm taking this and there's nothing you can do about it, then that meets your flowery language of "imposing their own rules" does it not? That meets your definition of "living off them without effort" does it not?
We owe them nothing.
Someone produces a book, movie, song, game that you enjoy and you say you "owe them nothing".
to encourage these lazy persons to produce our music
The "lazy persons produce our music", eh? You see no contradiction in that sentence? You condemn as lazy people who write novels, record albums, film movies, develop games. You have no conception of how much work or expense any of these things involve, clearly. If it's so trivial, and you're so not lazy, why don't you make your own novels, albums, movies and games? Surely not because that would require effort / money / expertise.
but they have abused our trust and taken it to the extreme.
How, in precise words, has someone abused your trust? Because I've always been under the impression that movies / novels / music / games, were being sold to me. I was never "trusting" that these things were all being thrust into my hands for free only to suddenly find that my trust was broken because someone asked for money as I left the shop or clicked the "Confirm Order" button.
They deserve no pity. The problem is not solved by forcing the population to spend all their extra money on copies of bits
Yes. They are demons, irrevocably damned. We must not pity people who spend their time or money on producing things.
The problem is not solved by forcing the population to spend all their extra money on copies of bits.
Disingenuous in the extreme. When was the last time anyone forced you to spend your money on a movie or TV show or a novel or whatever? Really - when were you forced to spend this money?
It is solved by introducing sane copyright law, that brings balance back into the game.
After the illogical, unsupported and self-contradicting post you just made, you have as much right to talk about "sane" as King Herod does to talk about "child care"
http://xkcd.com/488/ [xkcd.com]
The argument of that comic is that you should steal things because of DRM. Precisely what media are you finding today that DRM prevents your fair use of? You realise that the argument in that comic is no argument for pirating anything that is available without effective DRM?
It's almost taken as a given that the world would have less creativity without copyright but I do wonder.
I think that's a strawman. I don't think anyone is arguing that there would be less creativity, or else you've really picked the wrong word for what you mean. Ideas flow. What copyright does is enable people (whether the producer(s) directly or an organisation such as a company) to invest effort in bringing that creativity to its limits. Your recipe analogy is a very bad one. It's instructions for how to do something. (And no, that's not the same as software). Writing a novel takes a long time and is a lot of work. Producing a movie, even a cheap one, takes much more money than most individuals have to spare. Leaving aside why should anyone put all that effort or money in to bring a concept to fruition, you can't even solve the how if people aren't willing to commit to paying for viewing / listening to / reading the final work.
Of course no someone is going to complain that composing and cooking a good meal can't be compared to composing and playing a good piece of music because..... well just because!
No, we'll point out that it's a naff comparison. The analogue to someone pirating music is not that person saying: "hey, I like Lady GaGa's new song. Let's also rent a studio, arrange the musicians, record it and mix it". And you must know this.
What if the movie, the song or the game were so awfully bad that the pirate wasn't even able (or willing) to consume the material? Why should he buy it?
Music: There are any number of sites where you can listen to either the whole track or the first thirty seconds to see if you'll like it or not. Are you seriously suggesting that you need to pirate music to know if you'll like it or not?
Movies: Trailers, reviews, friends. Live a little dangerously - take a chance that you might not 100% enjoy a movie before you rent it or go to see it.
Games: Reviews, demos, friends, reasonable educated guesses.
Seriously, your justification for piracy is that the risk of the very occasional lemon that sneaks through is too much? That this is such an impact on life that taking without paying becomes legitimised?
GP wasn't attempting to hype up piracy. He was attempting to legitimise it with the "everybody does it" argument. Which he is unable to support with statistics, incidentally. The media we enjoy is funded by those of us who pay for it. The freeloaders do nothing but live off other people.
Not anymore, so you can stop worrying. Your right to free entertainment is now saved by the heroic pirates.
Fuck the freeloading pirates. All I want is to be able to stick a Blu-Ray that I've bought into my Linux box and play it properly. Admittedly I've got it working now, but it certainly wasn't easy at the time (I imagine it's a bit simpler now, but still not trivial).
Here's a practical test for you then. Go punch a car windscreen and see how many bones you have left in your hand thereafter. That's something that is entirely glass (if you ignore the heating wires) and it's pretty tough. The GP's point stands: Even if the thing were 1/4", that wouldn't necessarily mean it were fragile.
The last thing I would want would be a device that was as thin as the panel on my phone. Okay, I want my device to be light, but I also want it to have a reasonable chance of surviving being sat on.
How does burning a book violate anyone's human rights?
Comments that get nested as deeply as this thread is doing, it gets hard to track who is arguing for which side. You're mistaken - I'm actually arguing that hindering people from burning the book would impose on their human rights.
So you're arguing they are morally obliged to broadcast a message they fully disagree with and find repugnant?
Same way I'm being morally obliged to defend this church's privilege in broadcasting an event that I disagree with and find stupid. Free Speech for all and it shouldn't be hindered.